As the former director of the USAID-funded Preparedness and Response (P&R) project, I appreciated  Michael Gerson’s Feb. 21 Friday Opinion essay, “A glimpse of victory against the coronavirus.” In particular, his emphasis on the potential danger if the virus that causes covid-19 reaches highly vulnerable countries in Africa, such as Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, was timely. The P&R project worked in these three countries and 12 additional countries in Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia from 2014 to 2019 building local capacity to prevent and contain emerging pandemic threats.

Unfortunately, the funding for the umbrella Emerging Pandemic Threats program at USAID was cut severely in the 2019 budget, eliminating funds for Phase 2 of the P&R project, as well as funds for its sister project, PREDICT, which focused on identifying and preventing the spillover of animal-borne viruses to humans. As we confront the prospect of covid-19 spreading to these highly vulnerable countries, these local staff and advisers are no longer in place.

It is critical to understand that funding for pandemic preparedness and response has been episodic, depending ironically on outbreaks such as avian influenza, H1N1 and Ebola to reinvigorate support and dollars for essential programs. Going forward, we need a mechanism for sustained funding of pandemic preparedness capacity in resource-poor countries around the world, because an outbreak anywhere can be an outbreak everywhere.

Jerry Martin, Derwood